Next week we’ll be hosting a free webinar on successful early resolution strategies for IP disputes, featuring Edward A Mas and Leland G Hansen of McAndrews Held & Malloy and Vaishali Udupa of Hewlett-Packard

As the speakers will illustrate, and as many readers will know from experience, patent litigation (especially in the US) can be expensive, long-lasting and disruptive to your business. Despite the courts’ best efforts to streamline and focus disputes, many people’s experience is that things are getting worse.

The webinar takes place next Wednesday September 10 at 11am EST and will last one hour (register for free using the link here). The speakers will discuss all the measures that parties to disputes can take, including preparation, selecting forum, assessing costs, avoiding delays and judging if and when to settle.

They will also look at the merits of the opportunities now available at the USPTO: inter-partes review, post-grant review and re-examination. Regular readers will know that these proceedings at the PTAB are the subject of the cover story in our September issue (trial or subscription required for full access), and were reviewed by Michael Loney in this recent blog post.

Finally, the webinar will cover mediation and arbitration, including practical issues such as timing, who should be involved and how to conclude a deal. We know there’s a lot of interest in ADR in IP disputes at the moment – as shown by the recent conference in Alicante and a mock arbitration that will be held during the AIPPI Congress in Toronto later this month.

If you have to deal with, or face the prospect of, patent litigation, particularly in the US, do join us for the webinar next week: once registered, you can join live (and ask questions) and/or listen again to the recorded version.